Recently I have begun to have an interest in the agricultural practice of gleaning. In the OT this was the commandment that we are not to totally harvest all of our fields or vineyards but to leave some for the poor (the widow, the orphan, the foreigner) to harvest. Today our food banks are largely gleaning operations where the leftovers from our grocery stores are distributed to the needy.
This interest in gleaning was generated by the fact that this summer we had a huge surplus of tomatoes. After canning more than thirty quarts, we begin delivering the BEST of our remaining tomatoes to the parish food pantry in leftover cartons from last year when we had had to purchase tomatoes from a local farm market. Those cartons have a capacity of ten pounds and we filled seven of them.
We have often done this in past years of our excess vegetables. So I am going to a propose to the parish that we start a gardening club to encourage this. A nearby parish has had a garden club and green house for over twenty years. It was started by a new pastor as a means of building community. It has so thrived that they now have a second green house, donated in her will by a garden club member. There model does not encourage people to grow in their home gardens but come to the parish to do their gardening. They raise flowers as well as vegetables and sell them before and after Mass. They donate some food (I suspect the less desirable) to local food banks. I think there is room for both the home and parish models.
I decided to do a Bible study on gleaning and was surprised that the texts describing it come from Leviticus which has a list of commandments that parallels closely those Ten we find in Exodus. The commandment about gleaning is featured at the head of the list of commandments pertaining to people (ahead of killing, stealing, etc.)
When I realized that this Sunday readings were about the greatest commandments. I had thought the first reading might be from Exodus. It is but the commandments are not the Ten but those about marginal people (but not the gleaning commandments of Leviticus).
Gleaning is popular in some circles because it emphasizes the dignity of the poor by requiring them to work to gather it (not just a handout like our modern food pantries). Of course, they probably do not understand that in the OT all the land ultimately belonged to God, and that this practice was a reminder of that. In the OT the same word used for gathering the remnants was also used for gathering the manna in the desert. The poor are to be fed by God just as all Israel was in the desert.
I wish the first reading was from Leviticus. In the early church the offertory was the collection of all the goods of the congregation for redistribution to the poor. A major role of the deacons was to preside over this redistribution. It was a recognition that all our possessions ultimately belong to God. What a wonderful parallel to the manna in the desert.
When I think of gleaning in the OT, the story of Ruth and Naomi is the one that comes to mind.
ReplyDeleteI am impressed by your abundant harvest of tomatoes! There have been community gardens here, but usually the problem is getting people to commit to showing up to do the work in them. There is a retired priest in our area who donates prodigious amounts of produce to the food pantry. He gets the K of C, and kids who need "living the faith" points for Confirmation to help him in his big garden.
I'm not a very good gardener. We had a hard frost the other night and my poor little flowers in the hanging basket bought the farm.
Interesting post, Jack.
ReplyDeleteI am reminded by it that Raber's mother grew up pretty impoverished. Her father died in the 1930s leaving his wife with five girls from age 16 to 5. Wife was overwhelmed with grief and went to bed for a year.
The two oldest girls quit school and went to work in a bakery where they could bring home the day-old bread. They got the younger girls on Saturdays to walk the train tracks to pick up coal that had fallen off the cars for their furnace.
Gleaning in an urban environment.
My childhood hometown was several blooks wide between the river and the railroad. The railroad had an off-ramp into the steel mill which was next to us downriver. Rail cars on that ramp had junk steel from various places which was consumed by the steel mill for its needs. At that time most of its structure and machines were of steel which it fabricated itself.
DeleteThe men of the town would ransack of the railroad cars at night since they were easy to get into and out. A kind of illegal gleaning? Everyone knew it was going on.
The workers in the mill often took out materials for their home needs. Originally our cabin sat on concrete piers. We did not want to enclose the foundation. However, the frost line there was deep and several of the concrete blook piers became displaced.
My father, who worked in the steel mill, had pieces of steel welded to five-foot long six-inch wide pipes to replace the concrete piers. In the steel mill these were known as "government jobs."
When we bought our house, it had a coal furnace. To cut down on the coal expense, we sometimes went to a local "slag dump." This was a place which had the remains of old coal mining operations, e.g. coal that was mixed with other rock which could be broken off and the coal used.
A neat story of gleaning was told by a professor in an accounting class I once took. As a student he had a summer internship with a company. They had a lot of mental trash which a local farmer came and picked up each day with a wagon pulled by a horse. He calculated the value of the "trash" that was going out each day, and the company quickly decided to charge a fee for it. The farmer agreed to the fee, and the next day showed up with a great looking pickup truck. He no longer had to play the role of the "poor" farmer since he was getting rich on his metal gleaning.
We have a lot of people in the area who supplement their income by recycling metal. The custom is to put your kaput appliances and whatnot at the street and make an announcement on the community page. Usually gone in an hour. Several years ago we did a big junk clear out and rented a dumpster. Local guys methodically sifted thru for metal scrap and put it all back neatly. Even went around the dumpster with their big magnet to get nails, bolts, and screws.
DeleteOne guy has a special needs kid and invalid mother he's trying to care for. Drives a school bus, does metal scrapping, works seasonal job at the seed factory, does lawns when his mower works.
When I see what people in this area have to do to make ends meet, I want to slap the crap out of Republicans in nice white collar jobs who fuss that handouts will just turn people into lazy louts.
Another custom in our small town was to have several days a year when you could put out anything you wanted for the garbage collection, old furniture etc. Of course, anyone that wanted could come along and glean it before the garbage man came.
DeleteJack's spirituality of gleaning, and Jean's family history of her aunts working in the bakery as teens, brought to mind this short story / memoir by William Saroyan from the 1930s, "Resurrection of a Life". I think it's considered autbiographical, of Saroyan growing up poor early in the century. I ran across it some years ago in an anthology of 20th century short stories. Here is the paragraph - the "He" is himself as a young boy selling newspapers in the city:
Delete"He used to get up before daybreak and walk to The San Joaquin Baking Company. It was good, the smell of freshly baked bread, and it was good to see the machine wrapping the loaves in wax paper. Chicken bread, he used to say, and the important man in the fine suit of clothes used to smile at him. The important man used to say, What kind of chickens you got at your house, kid? And the man would smile nicely so that there would be no insult, and he would never have to tell the man that he himself and his brother and sisters were eating the chicken bread. He would just stand by the bin, not saying anything, not asking for the best loaves, and the important man would understand, and he would pick out the best of the loaves and drop them into the sack the boy held open. If the man happened to drop a bad loaf into the sack the boy would say nothing, and a moment later the man would pick out the bad loaf and throw it back into the bin. Those chickens, he would say, they might not like that loaf. And the boy would say nothing. He would just smile. It was good bread, not too stale and sometimes very fresh, sometimes still warm, only it was bread that had fallen from the wrapping machine and couldn’t be sold to rich people. It was made of the same dough, in the same ovens, only after the loaves fell they were called chicken bread and a whole sack full cost only a quarter. The important man never insulted. Maybe he himself had known hunger once, maybe as a boy he had known how it felt to be hungry for bread. He was very funny, always asking about the chickens. He knew there were no chickens, and he always picked out the best loaves."
He gives this particular "important man" a pass, but not some others. The full story is here if anyone is interested: https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/resurrection-of-a-life/
I don't think our country grapples with poverty anymore like we did in the 1930s.
Plenty of hard times, just not the same landscape as the 1930s, which none of us here lived through. Not to shove anybody's empathy into dangerous overdrive, but nationally over the past one to four years:
DeleteHome foreclosures up 42 percent
Delinquent property tax seizure up 5.2 percent
Personal bankruptcies up 12.2 percent
Homelessness up 3 percent
Food bank use up 25 percent
Medicaid/CHiP enrollment up 2 percent
Electricity shutoff for non payment up 28 percent
I'd say that looks an awful lot like the first few chapters of The Grapes of Wrath.
And a coda to the story of Raber's aunties lest anybody wants to turn this into a heartwarmer about family and pluck: None of them was able to finish high school. All of them had dentures by age 40. None of them could ever afford her own home. All died before age 70 of diseases they could not afford to treat.
We watch some shows on Brit box. Sometimes they speak of "allotments", which are small plots of land that people rent from the town council, or occasionally the Church of England, for the purpose of growing a garden. They are separate from the people's dwellings, but they are not community gardens, they are rented by individuals. If one believes the plots of some of the shows, people jealously protect the rights to their allotments!
ReplyDeleteSome of those British institutions like allotments are ancient and designed to offer poor relief. Common land (which might be public or private) was designated for pasturage and wood gathering. "Hospitals" connected to churches gave shelter to elderly men (bedesmen) in exchange for daily prayers for the souls of church benefactors.
DeleteOff topic. I’ve been in the hospital since Wednesday morning, brought here by ambulance. I will have my gall bladder removed tomorrow. Apparently it is the source of the acute pancreatitis and sepsis. So the non believer in intercessory prayer ( who always prays for others just in case it helps) is asking prayers for no complications with the surgery. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteGod be with you and your caregivers.
DeleteAnne, I am so sorry to hear that! Sending prayers that all goes well with your surgery, and for healing of the sepsis and pancreatitis.
DeleteWe are praying for your quick recovery
DeleteAnne, so sorry - I did not see this until a moment ago. I hope by now, it is out (although I am still saying a prayer :-)) and you are on the road to recovery. Please let us know.
DeleteAnne, late to find this out myself. Very sorry to hear this. I pray all went well and that you recover quickly
DeleteBack to gleaning: My former colleague and friend Larry reminds me that when he taught high school, kids emptied their lockers into 50 gallon fiber board drums placed at intervals along hallways. Anxious to be out for summer, kids indiscriminantly dumped their stuff and bugged out. Teachers regularly went thru the drums to rescue notebooks, pens, gym shoes, t-shirts, jackets, etc. Most of this stuff was sorted, laundered as needed, and kept in a resource room and recycled back to kids who needed it the following year.
ReplyDeleteAccording to the NEA, teachers in the US spend between $500 and $900 of their own money on classroom supplies: https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/rising-cost-school-supplies-increases-burden-teachers